IBM Goes Beyond Just Slapping 'Cloud' Label on Old Products

IBM has re-tooled its cloud strategy in a way that should appeal to enterprises, analysts say.

By Jon Brodkin
Mon, June 15, 2009

Network World — After some fits and starts, IBM has re-tooled its cloud strategy and come up with a set of offerings that should make both the public and private cloud models more appealing to enterprises, analysts say.

10 Cloud Computing Companies to Watch

When Big Blue unveiled its "Blue Cloud" initiative about 18 months ago, the company mainly focused on slapping the "cloud" label on a bunch of previously released products, Forrester analyst James Staten says.

"When they launched Blue Cloud, we accused them of cloud washing, by taking a bunch of existing stuff and saying 'this is cloud' and 'this is cloud,'" Staten notes.

IBM has made many cloud-related marketing pushes since that time, but an announcement this week of several cloud services and products shows the progress IBM has made, Staten says.

Staten says IBM seems to have learned lessons from customer engagements, allowing it to create new technologies and repackage others in ways that are appealing to enterprises, rather than only small businesses. IDG analyst Frank Gens adds that IBM's technology can help enterprises standardize services with virtualization and automation, all while offering enterprise-grade security, privacy and availability.

IBM is guilty of some hyperbole, claiming in a draft press release that it has created "the industry's first set of 'cloud' services and integrated products for the enterprise."

But overall, Staten says that "IBM is now showing that it actually gets the cloud."

IBM is focusing on development and test environments and virtual desktop management with this week's announcement, saying it will help clients build private clouds behind their firewalls for these purposes. IBM will also host a public cloud service so that enterprises can access test and dev environments or virtual desktops from a remote location over a network connection. On the virtual desktop side, IBM partners with vendors such as VMware and Citrix, and adds its own management tools to automate processes, monitor key systems and deploy security and governance policies.

Although IBM said its public cloud is only in a "preview" mode, it is already in use by a limited number of customers including the Pike County School District in Kentucky, which is accessing virtual desktops from an IBM-hosted data center.

Although several of the announced cloud technologies aren't new, IBM is packaging them in new ways that allow CIOs to deploy services faster and increase levels of automation and efficiency within the data center, analysts say.

For example, IBM's new CloudBurst appliance provides a 42U rack with blade servers; storage; the VMware hypervisor; various software components that help provision new services and manage energy use; and self-service portals for developers. Shipping June 19 at a list price of $207,000, the product competes against HP's recent BladeSystem Matrix system.

1 2 next page »

You are here: Technology Topics » News

Most Recent Technology Topics Stories

White Papers »

Has Your Server Infrastructure Kept Pace with End User Demands?

Learn how your answer to this question compares to your peers by taking this quick poll. See how your peers are dealing with the challenge of ensuring a highly capable server infrastructure as technological shifts impact the application server platform.

Enterprise Strategy Group: The Case for a New Data-centric DLP White Paper

With increasing data growth, comes increased need for data security. The existing DLP model, with a focus on compliance/enforcement is not sufficient as the data discovery and classification capabilities are not granular enough. Read this paper to find how you can efficiently and accurately manage your risk by rapidly inventorying and classifying your data and then developing remediation workflows that support business needs.

Data Loss by the Numbers

This paper breaks down attack sources into four categories: external, malicious insiders, accidental insiders, and unknown.

Data Loss Prevention Solution for Managing E-Discovery

The rapid growth of data and technology is creating challenges for organizations as this digital data is considered to be business communications and must be preserved according the same industry-specific regulations governing the retention and discovery of emails and more traditional forms of electronic communications. This paper examines the role that Data Loss Prevention ("DLP") technology can play in helping organizations address the challenges of locating information in response to electronic discovery.

Best Practices in Data Protection - Executive Summary

This research, conducted by the Ponemon Institute, focuses on issues relating to the use of data protection solutions such as endpoint encryption and data loss prevention within the workplace.

Business Centric DLP

This report, by Jon Oltsik from Enterprise Strategy Group, examines the need for a new business-centric approach to DLP in order to align business and security requirements.

Webcasts »

Virtualization Success is a Team Effort

As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.

Customer Spotlight: How IPC The Hospitalist Company Implemented Oracle on VMware

Have you been looking to hear about customer's experiences with the new VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product? View this webcast to learn about VMware customer, Navicure, and their experiences testing and evaluating the recovery manager, their progress in implementing it in their environment and their advice other customers considering using vCenter.

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View - Webcast

Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business

Deliver Private Cloud Database as a Service with VMware vFabric Data Director

VMware recently announced VMware vFabric™ Data Director, a new database deployment and operations platform that enables enterprise IT organizations to offer database as a private cloud service. Built on top of VMware vSphere 5, vFabric Data Director enables IT organizations to ontrol database sprawl through automation and consistent policy enforcement and accelerate application development cycles with self-service database management. Attend this webcast to learn how vFabric Data Director can help you build database-as-a-service in your datacenter.

Reliable Disaster Protection with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

A simple, cost-effective disaster-recovery solution for virtual environments is high on the agenda for IT organizations as they virtualize more business-critical applications with VMware. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager-the market-leading disaster-recovery product-ensures the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides centralized management of recovery plans, enables nondisruptive testing and automates site-failover processes.

Introduction to VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5

Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often too expensive, complex and unreliable to meet business requirements. As a result, IT departments are hesitant to expand disaster protection beyond their most critical applications, largely because they are uncertain whether the quality of the protection is really worth its cost. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5 is the market-leading disaster recovery product that addresses this situation for organizations of all kinds. It complements VMware vSphere to ensure the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter